Php Advice on best approach

[oracle765]

Hi professionals just after some advice on what to do for the best here

 

We have a website that queries Expedia, Laterooms and a few other hotel APIs and displays the hotel results which is fine

 

The problem is it takes a very long time and the user waits and waits and waits for the results to be displayed

 

Is there a way to display some results asap to the user whilst the APIs are still querying and then the rest of the results once finished

 

Or a way to build up the result set bit by bit

 

 

Any advice if this is possible and where to start would be greatly appreciated

 

Thanks in advance

Alan

[scootstah]

The term you're looking for is "asynchronous". You can't delay output with PHP alone. Output is sent once the script is finished. You would need to use Javascript to accomplish this.

 

There are a number of ways to solve this. You could use AJAX with JSONP. Or if the API's allow CORS, you can just use straight up AJAX. Or, you could have a PHP script run in the background and then use AJAX to call that script.

[CroNiX]

@scootstah, not sure what you mean by "output is sent once the script is finished". I believe that's only the case if you're using output buffering?

[scootstah]

I mean that you cannot send output, wait for the API calls, and then send some more output. Output buffering can be used to order the output, but it still has to wait for the script to finish.

[oracle765]

ok I will look into this

 

So there is no way to poll them as sessions or something

 

thanks again